Last month I wrote about thoughts about what changes education must undertake. A recent article about Starbucks reiterates some of my key thoughts. Fast Company wrote about how Starbucks is willing to risk by moving at speed with deep innovation. The article started this way:
With 18,000 stores and 200,000 employees, rolling out any program at Starbucks–whether for a coffee flavor, an app, or a daily deal–is going to be risky, considering the employee training and consumer marketing involved. But the company seems almost to court risk in its willingness to move fast and push through innovation at scale, especially in the digital arena.
It’s an approach more typical of startups than corporate giants, with their paranoia about earnings calls and PR disasters. Starbucks accepts that innovation is messy, and it is willing to suffer setbacks here and there to be a disruptive force.
Sound familiar? I wrote that “speed matters” and that “R&D pays off.” And, in today’s world, R&D is not something done behind closed doors. Starbucks has been willing to try out innovative strategy on mobile payments. The speed at which they are moving is risky, but necessary. As I wrote last month, higher education “must determine to think like a “start up” in order to facilitate decisions more quickly.”
Last month, I tried to pull these two ideas (speed wtih R&D) in the following paragraph: “To disrupt, we must go all in….can’t be half way about change. If we don’t disrupt, we face entropy. For far too long, academia has seemingly adopted an attitude that “we know best; leave us alone as we continue to educate the same way its been done for over hundreds of years.” But, if we are going to really change, we can’t be half-hearted. And, remember point #8 above—we MUST reinvent, we must disrupt. Or, maybe another way to say it is that higher education is ALREADY BEING DISRUPTED. The question is will experts and innovators who are INSIDE (like Valencia) going to be brave enough and move fast enough to change the current conversation. If they refuse to go all in, the speed of others will constantly outpace the stodgy old higher education system, and half-way change will be ignored by culture that will always move towards the fastest moving, deepest innovators (don’t believe me…go ask Blockbuster about Netflix or Redbox….or go ask Myspace about Facebook).”
Starbucks does not want to wake up to find it has been supplanted like the RIAA did when Napster hit the Internet. It realizes it must constantly transform, even if there will be “bumps in the road.” Fast Company recognized this when they closed out their article about Starbucks this way:
Considering Starbucks’s results, though, it’s hard to argue with the approach. “You can’t move forward and be a leader and an innovator if you’re only worried about the downside,” Brotman says, “but please don’t mistake that for being cavalier.” With 35 million monthly visitors to its websites and mobile apps, the company’s digital scale rivals its physical presence. Those visitors are using Starbucks’s tools to find nearby stores, gain loyalty rewards, and load money on their Starbucks cards, which now account for 30% of in-store sales. It’s a spectacular feat in such a short time and one worth a few quick stumbles.
Yes. Or, as I warned last month, “We must reinvent. No one is allowed to remain static. Entropy kills.”
Starbucks is determined to not die, or certainly not go down without a fight. Higher education needs to go to take notes and learn this lesson.